fictionary… 8 megapixel artist… bloody awful poet.

It’s Not About You

I don’t stockpile blog posts. I’m not in any way a prolific blogger. I used to wish I was like that; the Stephen King of blogging, grinding out page after page on any subject that popped into, or fell out of, my head. And for a short time, about ten years ago, I was heading in that direction, writing online.

Until a nasty bout of what I thought was writer’s block overtook me, and for the next few months I went from writing a feature column for a website to being an itinerant poet.

I’ve told the story before, so that’s why the short version this time. But there is a part I’ve never told, in print or in person, to anyone.

I started writing poetry for the same reason people vaguebook, or subtweet, before there were such things as vaguebooking and subtweeting. I started writing poetry because all the things I ever wanted to say to others required honesty. Feature-length, name the names, feel the feels, full disclosure honesty. And I wasn’t ready for that kind of honesty ten years ago. Just like I wasn’t ready for it five years ago, or two, or even more recently than that.

Poetry, and I just figured this out last week… I know, late to my own party, again… became a way of purging shit, real, honest shit, without ever having to confront another human being over that shit. See, I hate confrontation.

ALL CAPS HATE.

Of course I know what some of you are thinking, “How can a guy who writes the things you write NOT be confrontational?” And my marginally confrontational answer is, “Have you not read my writing?” See, I’m both blessed and cursed with a soul. Not the half-in/half-out, maybe I care/maybe I don’t kind of a soul. But the all-in/all-out/all-the-time kind of soul. The soul that can either love you, or burn the bridge you stand on while we’re talking. So because of that, and because this 100/100 soul can’t hold everything in ALL the time, I started purging all of it through the power of poetry. No names, vague scenarios, love you or burn the bridge you stand on, poetry.

And I am a saner man for it.

So if in the future, before you ask me, “Was that poem about me?” remember to look down and see if you’re standing on a bridge ready to be burned, and know that I probably love you, or I wouldn’t have written the poem in the first place.

Yes, you’re here and doing a super job of getting what you can’t say on paper in a beautiful heartfelt way. I’ve often wondered if I had been able to speak the things I felt how differently things might have turned out.

I totally get the purging nature of your poetry, the exorcising of inner demons and speaking the truth in ways that cannot be said in any other medium. It’s good to feel emotionally exhausted after spilling your guts, heart, mind and soul into your poetry because you know that your words represent the truest version of yourself that you can be and it is that what speaks directly to the core in everyone else who reads it. I see poetry as a calling, if you are willing to put everything into it then you are going to move mountains and inspire so many other people with it by simply being yourself. I wouldn’t want to do this if I couldn’t be myself.